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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
I discovered some notes I jotted down from a piece written in The New York Times Magazine by Andrew Sullivan called "This is a religious war" (October 7, 2001.) I found a copy here. Also check out Sullivan's pioneering, eponymous blog The Daily Dish.
Initially, one quote grabbed my attention: “All monotheisms have an inherent temptation for terrorism.” Yes, 'dem are fighting words. (Bad pun intended.) Provocative, without question, but not without substantial backing, especially through the brilliant research found in One True God: Historical Consequences of Monothesism by Rodney Stark which was featured by Stewart Brand as a GBN Bookclub. There are, of course, downsides to a strictly scholarly treatment of the spiritual, but it's worth the read. Educational is putting it mildly. "Monotheism is inherently combative—one true God," summarized Brand. "The four monotheistic religions enthusiastically battle with each other and within themselves, often over issues that seem trivial to outsiders but are deemed worth fighting over to the death by believers."
But what really made me think, going back to Sullivan's wee article, was the part where he alluded to the famous "Grand Inquisitor" passage from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1879). I needed to re-read this and saw why, years later after my liberal arts education, it was such an important and subversive book.
In Dostoevsky's infamous scene, Jesus Christ comes back to earth and stumbles upon the Grand Inquisitor at his grim work dispensing justice to the heathen. Shockingly, the Inquisitor, when confronted with his Savior, is compelled to condemn him, to burn him at the stake with the rest of the sinners. Why? Not necessarily out of a cynical desire to preserve power, at least not at first. No, he thinks Jesus should burn as punishment because he gave humanity the prospect of salvation, the freedom to choose the "right" path, knowing full well that most of us will fail to do so. In short, this freedom was a form of cruelty, argued the Inquisitor. (Not coincidentally, this resonated, with my recent blog on The Paradox of Choice. )
To paraphrase Sullivan, the Grand Inquisitor passage is really about the tension between the transcendent claims of most religions and our human inability to live up to these ideals. Many people "want to resist the terror of choice, the abyss of unbelief." People need the certainty of certain truths to get through life's doldrums, dead-ends, and disappointments. Above all, people crave the comfort of a community of believers.
As much as I'm critiquing our abundance of choice, I'm in no way advocating the reverse, that is, a systemic taking away of freedoms or reverting back to a day when authoritarian systems dominated our lives. No way, José. We just need to get better at understanding the relationship between freedom and choice, its limitations and "initial conditions", on multiple levels. We also need to recognize the kind of serendipity and structure that comes with the interaction of choice and life's randomness, which is only nature's way of making things interesting, diverse, and dynamic. But I digress. Back to religion...
Detail of Hands from Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Buonarroti
© World Films Enterprises/CORBIS
In March, when my mentor and colleague Napier Collyns was visiting, we touched on aspects of this conversation as we walked to Parc Monceau, one of the most treasured and aristocratic of greenspaces in Paris. In absolute frustration and disgust with all of this "God business", all of this sectarian violence and escalating fundamentalism, Napier asked, why do people need religion? I tried to argue really what Dostoevsky and Sullivan were saying, but without the sophistication and nuance. I think human beings will always need some larger narratives to help them make meaning of their lives, to help them negotiate the hardest questions of human existence. Modern life, which has essentially fragmented and challenged most larger narratives, is obviously failing to provide the goods. The hallmarks of modern life—art, shopping, sports—are not sustainable alternatives to many of the world's religions. In fact, modernity is likely strengthening religion, if certain statistics are correct in the rise of Islam and church attendance.
This immediately reminded me of what Don Michel, another mentor of mine and long-standing friend of Napier's, wrote in Planning to Learn and Learning to Plan, an almost forgotten piece of deep thinking and insight. (1973 reprinted in 1996.)
"A major cause and consequence of planet-wide social turmoil is increased efforts and demands to establish, change, or remove boundaries, and counter-efforts to perverse them. Networks may encourage boundaries to alter more rapidly, but boundaries are not disappearing. Perhaps more than in pre-network times, today's boundaries are built around concepts, convictions, relationships, and flows of information in the form of money or other symbols. But while flows of symbols may be unbounded in the abstract, they are absorbable only in the concrete — via organizational and personal interests, and actual operating modes. Ultimately, via individual human minds. All bounded. The mode and degree of absorption involve crucially important, mostly unmet, learning challenges, certainty in civil society."
So we need to ask the question, how can modern life and secular ways of living do a better job? What can we learn from these religions, from their spiritual experiences and practices? Or will, over time, something emerge from the post-modern period, a new meta-framework that helps people manage uncertainty and the creative challenge of meaning-making on an individual and collective level? Or is this division of labour between the secular and spiritual a good one?
After our walk, I became convinced that part of the problem is that non-believers don't understand what drives believers. This lack of understanding is compounded by a lack of respect, a feeling that this way of being is inferior to a "rational" or secular modus vivendi. Hopefully new insight from the cognitive sciences into how the rational and irrational interact, into how our emotional and intellectual states fuse and influence each other, might take the edge off some of these biases. But no, the Rationalist Paradigm is still Top Dog in the ways of knowing game.
Taking this back to my work, as part of our orthodoxy as scenario thinkers, the postmodern practitioners and framers of the future, we preach that living with uncertainty and ambiguity will be a core competency, something to embrace and master. That individuals and groups who develop this ability will be the ones that adapt and survive the current set of transitions. Intellectually, I buy this thesis, especially when I scan back on much of the literature in evolutionary anthropology. When restricted to certain domains (e.g. shifting political and commercial structures) this is definitely true. I also agree with Mary Catherine Bateson who claims that woman are much better at uncertainty management than men given our extensive practice with this throughout the ages. But emotionally, as someone who lives with a great amount of uncertainty partly by choice, as someone who has actively courted ambiguity in an almost perverse fascination, I am starting to appreciate the downsides of its embrace. It's not for everyone, or in fact, for most people. In Michel's words, "Most humans are insufficiently educated, skilled and motivated for reasoning systematically, cybernetically, in multivariate terms, and in terms of both/and, rather than either/or. They are unskilled at brining together rational reasoning, emotions, and feelings in the service of solving problems and living with predicaments."
Perhaps the biggest creative challenge, then, is helping people discover different pathways to meaning-making that avoid the structural disadvantages (if there are indeed these) to monotheism? Instead of just saying "live with uncertainty", an unsustainable vacuum in my opinion, perhaps the greatest thing we can do is help people live with uncertainty by active engagement with it, by bridging these two states somehow, by teaching "dilemma management" and deep Dialogue where the task is co-creating common ground. We need also to be clearer about the advantages of living in a post-modern sense, for being boundary-spanners instead of boundary-defenders, for being learners and questioners, and co-creators of meaning.
I'm a believer in these things, yet even I struggle. The advantages, in brief, are a strengthened sense of self, relatedness, and ultimately freedom: freedom gleaned from the realization that reality is socially constructed, both from the inside out (that is, as individuals) and from the outside-in (society, culture.) Hopefully this understanding will help us create better futures, futures less constrained by maladaptive dogmas, either secular or religious. This is probably not enough, not the stuff that can glue together a society, but I may lack the imagination to see how it might, how this new narrative(s) with new meta-values—"bounded" tolerance being a good candidate— might keep at bay the powerful drivers of fear, greed and the darker side of the Rogue Primate in us all. It's not coherent yet, at least in my mind. Another big project for the Now. But I'm quite certain that I'm a boundary-spanner, that this is my telos in life. Now put me to the test, Universe.
